The methods and systems of the invention relate to the processing of sales leads.
In the insurance industry, as well as other industries, sales leads play an important role in the operations of a firm, company or other entity. The sales leads are obtained from any of a wide variety of sources. For example, the sales leads might come into a company from potential customers as a result of direct mailings. The number of leads that are received every day may be in the hundreds or thousands. Further, a company or other entity may utilize hundreds or thousands of agents, i.e., the persons who will ultimately work the leads with the potential customers. The agents or other persons handling the leads may be distributed over various regions and have varying expertise. These factors, as well as others, result in the assignment and distribution of leads, as well as other processing of the leads, being a complex process for large companies, as well as small companies.
Further, conventional techniques of lead assignment, lead distribution and lead maintenance often include a reasonable amount of subjectivity and manual decision-making. This subjectivity and manual decision-making can often result in inefficiencies, as well as adverse attitudes from a person or persons who might feel slighted by a particular decision, i.e., regarding the assignment of a lead, for example. Further, the subjectivity and manual decision-making also add to the time consuming nature of the assignment and distribution of leads.
Further, the current processes associated with leads distribution to agents is paper intensive. Using conventional approaches, support leaders in the regional offices, for example, print lead cards and mail these paper documents to the agents. The agents work on these leads, mark the outcome and mail the lead cards to a further location, where the outcome or disposition of the sales leads are manually entered into the system. In addition, while the agent is working the lead, there is no systemic mechanism of tracking activities on a given lead.
Further, problems relate to agent generated business, i.e., business that is generated by an agent as opposed to activities of the company. Using conventional techniques agent generated business may not be monitored until an actual sale occurs. That is, agent generated business is commonly performed without any pre-sales assignment or tracking.
Further, known systems and methods fail to allow effective maintenance of leads. For example, shortcomings of existing systems include deficiencies in tracking the history of a lead, deficiencies in tracking the pre-sales activity of a lead, and lack of control over the timely processing of the outcome of a lead.
The methods and systems of the invention address the above problems, as well as other problems and shortcomings of known techniques for processing sales leads.